Saturday, August 30, 2008

Soar Utah!

Yep I'm like any guy with a hobby I take it to the extreme (if you asked someone that doesn't have a similar hobby, however within the slope soaring "community" I'm no where near extreme). Some people travel across the country to go fishing, hunting, golfing, skiing, snowboarding, etc. but I travel to locations that support my radio controlled "Slope Soaring" habit. I mean if you are working for an airline and have sweet travel benefits you might as well use them even if it seems a little crazy. You can look back to my ATL-SFO trip in April for another slope soaring trip.

The event I went to was in Salt Lake City Utah and scheduled to go from Thurs-Mon. but I just went for Saturday and Sunday. Slope soaring is highly dependent on weather and more specifically WIND (the more wind the better in most cases). It has been said that there are two ways to guarantee no wind at a slope site.1) Travel great distances.2) Plan an event.I'm happy to say that this was not the case this year. The wind was absolutely rocking the two days I was there (the major parts of the event). Saturday it was blowing steady 25-30mph all afternoon and Sunday was even stronger with a steady 35mph all day gusting up to 50mph at times. I got to see some really cool planes fly and see some very impressive flying. I also put faces with names from a forum I spend a lot of time on www.rcgroups.com You can see live feed from the park here. It is a Paraglider/hanglider site all year but the local RC club that shares the hill with the fullscale fliers asked permission to have the whole hill for the event instead of the little area they normally fly.If you want to see or read some more about the event check out this thread on rcgroups. Pictures are towards the end of the thread.http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=804646My picshttp://picasaweb.google.com/wheatsr/SoarUtah#